<< Go Back

The Widow's Christmas Miracle

By Kathleen D. Bailey

Order Now!

THE WIDOW’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE
A Christmas Novella

“A voice cries in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.” Isa. 40:3

May 1849
The Nebraska Territory

“Well, they can’t stay here.”
Laban Jones banged one fist on the rough plank counter and glared at White Bear, the
Cheyenne chieftain’s son and his friend. “It’s out of the question,” he said, backing up to a more
reasonable tone. “I’m not set up to keep a woman here—or a kid.”

White Bear rubbed a hand across his brown forehead, once smooth, now creased with the care of his people. What was left of them. “I don’t have anyone else, Laban. My people died in the fire. You’re all I’ve got. All we’ve got.”
“But I’m not set up for--”
“I’ll help you build a bed in the barn. Red Dawn and the boy can stay in your quarters. Laban, you’re my friend. I—there’s no one else I trust.”
Strong words from the tribal leader who stopped by Laban’s trading post four to six times a year, trading furs and bead work and bone carvings for white flour, eggs and the few vegetables his people didn’t grow in their summer camp. White Bear often lingered for a meal or a game of chess, sometimes stayed overnight, rolling out his bedroll on the floor of the store. White Bear could read. He exchanged out-of-date newspapers from his travels for month-old magazines that found their way to the shop, and the two men discussed the politics Back East well into the evening. White Bear was a friend, probably the best friend Laban had out here.
But to take care of his kin?
And how could he take care of them? Laban reached under the counter, rubbed the place where the wooden leg met what was left of his thigh. He’d kept some skills from his cavalry days, he could fire the rifle he kept under the counter and the pistol he kept locked in the cash drawer. He could defend his store and anyone in it – as long as he didn’t have run, wrestle or disarm an opponent.
He prayed daily that he’d never be put to the test.

The woman was comely enough, small and slender, with big dark eyes above her high cheekbones. Scared dark eyes. She shrank back into White Bear, and the brave put an arm around her. He muttered something in their language.
Scared dark eyes, and long braids that glistened like licorice. A beautiful young woman, even in a buckskin dress over buckskin trousers that were torn and stained and burned at the fringes. About eighteen, maybe twenty, and afraid for her life. How could Laban comfort someone like her?
And a chubby boy with the same gleaming black hair, in his own tiny set of buckskins, running aimlessly up and down the aisles of the trading post. A three-year-old. Just the right age for a one-legged man to try to keep out of the merchandise, and keep safe on the prairie.
He could stall, stall while he thought. Nobody’d ever accused Laban Jones of rushing into anything. “Tell me again what happened.”
White Bear ushered the young woman to an empty barrel, what passed for a chair at the trading post, and he kept one hand on the trembling girl’s shoulder. “I came back from a scouting trip and found my village burned to the ground. Every tipi. Every horse dead or scattered. My brother and my mother dead. Others too charred to recognize. And Red Dawn and her boy still alive, but barely. The raiders thought they were dead. When the raiders rode in, Red Dawn took my nephew and hid in the wash. They were half-starved when I found them.”
Sometimes Laban wished White Bear’s English wasn’t so good. “What’s the boy’s name?”
“Soars With Eagles. My brother’s son. We had—have great hopes for him.”

Might as well get this over with. Though his surroundings were rough, Laban still had the manners Ma had drilled into him. He made sure his pant leg covered the wooden stump, then walked as gracefully as he could around the counter and to the young woman. “Ma’am, my name is Laban Jones and this here’s my store. You’re welcome to stay a while.” At least as long as White Bear was here.
The woman stared at him, her gaze as blank as a blind woman’s.
“She don’t speak English?” Laban guessed.
“She doesn’t speak. At all.” White Bear gazed down at the crown of the girl’s head. “She hasn’t spoken since I found her and the boy huddled in the wash. Probably not before that. I can only imagine what she’s seen, and what she went through to survive.”
“You know who did it?”
“I’ve an idea, and I’ll keep looking until I’m proven wrong.” White Bear’s expression hardened. “If I don’t have to worry about her and the boy.”
Laban looked at his friend. Tall, with shoulders that filled the narrow doorway of the trading post, and smooth dark skin stretched out over a planed face. Laban had seen him throw three thugs to the ground in a failed store robbery. Had seen him carry crates in from the freighters as if they weighed nothing. He was strong and perfect in his youth, the man Laban had always wanted to be. The man he could never be, since the cavalry outing that had cost him his leg.
The kind of man a woman like Red Dawn would want. “Why don’t you marry her?” Laban ventured. “The Bible says it’s a duty for a man to raise up children for the brother he lost.”

White Bear’s teeth glinted in his dark face. “That’s Old Testament, my friend, and you know it.” He sobered. “I did pray about it, Laban. Since the day I found them. But the Lord isn’t leading me to Red Dawn, at least not now. Trust me, I would know if He were.”
Nice that they could talk about their Lord together, the Lord Laban had found in those long months in an Army hospital, the Lord White Bear had found when he was apprenticed to an Eastern merchant. But Laban knew what was coming next.
“Have you seen--”
“I ain’t seen her. And I’ve asked.”
Their words tumbled over each other, a ritual more than two years old, since White Bear had met and lost the tall blond woman who’d passed through their summer buffalo camp. White Bear had never forgotten the woman, who could ride like the wind on a horse like midnight, or some such nonsense, and he asked Laban on every visit if he’d seen her. Or heard of her.
Laban quizzed his customers and dutifully reported every supposed sighting of the woman, who had expanded into an almost mythical creature who fought mountain lions and caught bandits with her bullwhip and stopped stagecoach robberies single-handed. For all Laban knew, she turned mice into cornmeal mush. But for all the tall tales, nobody seemed to know where she’d finally lighted.
“What are you going to do?”



White Bear gazed off into the distance, past the log walls of the shop, past the prairie itself. “I’m going to find the monsters who destroyed my people. And then I’m going to look for her.”
Laban looked away from the raw passion in his friend’s face. Had he ever felt that strongly about anything? His Lord, yes, though there were precious few ways to serve Him in this desolate outpost. But anything else? No. His passions died the day the field surgeon plied him with whiskey and laudanum and sawed through what was left of his leg.
He’d never dared ask for anything more.
But he could support other people’s dreams. And it would be good to have some company, even if it were a woman who wouldn’t talk and a rambunctious little boy.
Laban sighed. “Barn’s pretty tight. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix up a spot for me.”
###
It was a nightmare from which she would never wake up. Even here, where people seemed kind and White Bear hovered over her.
Red Dawn looked around the sturdy building. It was a “store” or a “trading post,” White Bear had explained to her in their language. He’d explained a lot of things, leading her and her boy on his horse across miles and miles of prairie, keeping pace with them when she knew he could eat up the miles by himself. He had talked most of the way, sometimes in English, a rambling background to her thoughts, more often in the Cheyenne tongue, words tumbling like a river across the flat land. If only he would stop. She craved silence, the silence of the grave.

His friend’s “trading post” held white people’s items from wall to wall, and on shelves in between the walls. Clay dishes glazed and painted with complicated scenes, tools, barrels with odd smells coming from them, and books like the book White Bear kept in his tipi and read from. Pieces of white people’s furniture, some with drawers that could open and close, at least two with black-and-white fingers arranged in odd patterns. Some of her own people’s crafts, weavings and such. So this was where White Bear went to trade.
So this was who he traded with. A tall man, not as tall as White Bear or her late husband, but tall enough and muscular under his homespun shirt and apron. His hair was light brown and curly, cut short but not too short. He had a square jaw and eyes the color of the prairie sky. Had she ever seen such eyes before?
And he was sad, a sorrow she understood but could not give voice to. Sadness lurked in those blue eyes, behind his welcoming smile. What had this man seen? What had he been through, besides losing his leg?
She wouldn’t be here long enough to find out.
She had lost too much. If only she hadn’t had Grey Eagle’s son. She could have taken her own life, or not struggled so hard to survive. But her precious boy, and the new life she carried, won over bereavement. She would live for their sake.
But as far away from here and the white man, any white man, as possible.

Order Now!

<< Go Back